“Until you find me?”
“Yes. Until I find you.”
Oddly enough, Joan didn’t feel funny holding the seven incense sticks. She had had a moment of dread when she realized that the little money she had been given might not be enough to buy seven sticks of incense. The irony of it almost made her do a very unpeasant-like thing – laugh out loud. Here she had US$25,000 in her bundle and yet it was possible she didn’t have enough money to buy seven stupid incense sticks. However, when she upended the cheap plastic change purse her contact on the ferry had supplied her, she found just enough.
With the sticks in hand, she opened one of the large wooden doors of the first pavilion. Before her was a pleasing room with hand-carved mahogany rails and three black lacquered screens. The floor was a much-worn marble. She walked through the quiet room and down a set of dark hardwood steps to the prayer chamber with its towering statues and kneeling pads. She waited for a moment then knelt. To her surprise, time seemed to slow down and sounds faded into the distance. She felt at ease.
She had never celebrated the passing of her lover Wu Fan-zi. And now, with the incense sticks in her hand, she had the opportunity.
She rubbed the sticks between her palms and in her heart sang his name.
Forty minutes later, a man knelt beside her with seven incense sticks in his hands. He touched his head to the ground then righted himself and rolled the sticks between his palms. As he closed his eyes he said, “The incense here is quite expensive, isn’t it?”
She began to rock on her knees. “Yes, it is.”
“Go up the stairs, out the back of the pavilion and look at the statue there. I’ll walk past you. Follow me.”
Chen came out of Fong’s office so fast that he didn’t even see Shrug and Knock until the poor man was prone on the ground. Chen immediately reached down to help him to his feet, “I’m terribly sorry. I hope your suit wasn’t ruined. If it needs cleaning I will supply whatever money is necessary . . . ”
“Get your stupid peasant hands off me! This jacket is new. It’s my favourite.” Shrug and Knock howled.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Chen said as he pulled the jacket off of Shrug and Knock then shoved his hands into the inside pocket while he continued to shake dirt off the jacket, both inside and out.
“Enough, you . . . ” Then Shrug and Knock let fly with a particularly demeaning comparison between Chen’s facial features and lower parts of other human beings’ anatomies, grabbed back his coat and walked back to his desk.
An hour later, Joan Shui was sitting across a table from her contact, who was clearly honoured to have her in his house. She thanked him for his help. She desperately wanted to ask to use his shower but she didn’t. Cleanliness could be dangerous. Her disguise of filth had protected her so far and she wasn’t going to change it now.
“Where is Xi Luan Tu?”
The man looked away.
“What?”
He took a deep breath then said, “He was supposed to contact us last week. All we know is that he is in Shanghai and he’ll contact us through the Internet.”
Joan’s heart fell.
Finally on the fourth call to the sixth name on Geoff’s list of numbers, Fong made contact – he thought of it as “getting through.” Through what he wasn’t quite sure.
“Are you the second wave?” the lightly lisped high Shanghanese female voice asked.
Fong flipped through the notes he’d made from Geoff’s CD-ROM to get the code sequence right. “Yes, I am here to drive away the storm.”
“Very clever,” the voice said.
Fong noted the word clever as a “go ahead, all is safe” code word and said, “We should meet.”
“We, no doubt, should.” A moment passed then she spoke. When she did, her voice was harder than before, “The Catholic cathedral on Caoxi Beilu, just after evening prayers.”
Fong didn’t know what time that would be but he could find out on his own. “How will I recognize you?”
“You won’t. I’ll recognize you.”
The phone went dead. For a moment Fong was at a loss: how could she recognize him? Then he got it – fuck! She thought he was Geoffrey Hyland, a white theatre director from Canada. He immediately punched redial on his phone. But the woman’s phone didn’t even ring. “A one-time cell phone,” he thought. “Damn.”
“Well?” Li Chou demanded of the young officer in front of him. “Have you succeeded?” The officer knew very well that Li Chou was not really asking a question but demanding results. The man nodded and held out a diskette that he slid into the D drive of the laptop on Li Chou’s desk. With a click of a mouse, a map overlay of Shanghai’s streets appeared on the screen. With a second mouse click, a point of light began to blink. The point of light remained in the middle of the screen but the street map overlay was in constant motion identifying the dot’s whereabouts.
Li Chou smiled. “How long will it last?”
“It draws power from their bug. As long as their bug’s bugging, our bug’s bugging their bug. They draw power from the cell phone; we draw power from them.”
“Power drawing power,” Li Chou thought. He liked that. Then he looked closely at the young man before him. Being a devious man himself, he assumed that this man would also have a hidden side – and more immediately important, a hidden agenda. Li Chou knew that the best way to defeat such agendas was to demand exact details. “How did you mange to bug Captain Chen’s bug?”
“Your man saw Chen enter central stores. I called my contact there. He informed me that Captain Chen had requested a bug. Well . . . ” the man shrugged, “my friend bugged their bug and gave me the software to follow it.”
Li Chou didn’t like it. This young man was too clever by half then by half again. He smiled but filed away his concern. He would not nurture potential competition in his ranks.
“Is there a problem, sir?” the man asked.
“No,” Li Chou lied easily. “You can leave.”
The man waited to get at least a nod of appreciation or a mention of a job well done – but none was forthcoming. He turned and left.
He wasn’t brave enough to slam the door.
Li Chou hit the Enlarge icon and immediately the scale of the street map changed. Li Chou checked the street coordinates. There was some sort of Christian temple right there.
He reached for his phone.
Evening prayers began just after sundown. A call to the Bishop of Shanghai confirmed the exact time. Fong had all the cathedral’s side doors locked so everyone had to use the main entrance. Just inside the front foyer, Fong had positioned four uniformed cops facing the entrance doors. He and Captain Chen waited outside on the front steps in the hope that a Dalong Fada member would enter the cathedral, see the cops and, as surreptitiously as possible, head right back out.
Fong reached into his pocket and touched the bugged cell phone with the wireless Internet connection he had retrieved from behind the toilet.
“Is this a religious place, sir?” asked Captain Chen.
“Yes, it’s a main Catholic church, Xujiahui Cathedral. It was built by the Jesuits. In English they call it St. Ignatius Cathedral.”
“We have nothing quite like this in the country.”
“No. But with all the beauty out there why would you need it?” Fong checked his watch. It was 8:30 p.m. The service had begun twenty minutes ago. Fong cursed himself for not asking the bishop how long it would go on.
All the people who came to this evening’s service had gone past the cops without comment and had stayed for prayers. Shanghanese were usually unfazed by the presence, even the large armed presence, of the police. Fong and Chen watched, but no one had turned around and come back out since the service began.